literally to
have nursed Alfieri in this period of moral sickness as one might nurse
a sick or badly-bruised child. "Without him," writes Alfieri, "I think
I should most likely have gone mad. But he, although he saw in me a
would-be hero so disgracefully broken in spirit and inferior to himself"
(this passage is characteristic, as showing that Alfieri considered
himself, when in a normal condition, far superior to his much-praised
Gori), "although he knew better than any the meaning of courage and
endurance, did not, therefore, cruelly and inopportunely, oppose
his severe and frozen reason to my frenzies, but, on the contrary,
diminished my pain by dividing it with me. O rare, O truly heavenly
gift, this of being able both to reason and to feel."

Weeping and raving, Alfieri was living once more upon letters received
and sent as during his previous separation from Mme. d'Albany; and of
all these love-letters, none appear to have come down to us. Carefully
preserved by Mme. d'Albany and by her heir Fabre, they fell into the
hands of a Mr. Gache of Montpellier, who assumed the grave responsibility
of destroying them and of thus suppressing for ever the most important
evidence in the law-suit which posterity will for ever be bringing
against Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany in favour of Charles Edward, or
against Charles Edward in favour of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany. But some
weeks ago, among the pile of the Countess's letters to Sienese friends
preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri at Siena, I had the good fortune
to discover what are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously
intended for Alfieri although addressed to his friend Francesco Gori.
I confess that an eerie feeling came over me as I unfolded these five
closely-written, unsigned and undated little squares of yellow paper,
things intended so exclusively for the mere moment of writing and
reading, all that long-dead momentary passion of a long-dead man and
woman quivering back into reality, filling, as an assembly of ghosts
might fill a house, and drive out its living occupants, this present
hour which so soon will itself have become, with all its passions and
worries, a part of the past, of the indifferent, the passionless. One is
frightened on suddenly being admitted to witness, unperceived, as by
the opening of a long-locked door, or by some spell said over a crystal
globe or a beryl-stone, such passion as this; one feels as if one would
almost rather not. These